How We Can Help Your Program Grow:

Opportunity Snapshots:

Take the first step toward preparing your program for its next growth spurt. Request an Opportunity Snapshot from the DAI Palliative Care Group. What's in it? Everything you'll need to develop a Success Acceleration Plan for your program. The Opportunity Snapshot will offer you insights into:

  • Current performance gaps in your revenue cycle and workflow processes that restrain your growth
  • Superior practices of more mature programs to help you establish success metrics
  • Organizational structures that reduce, even remove, barriers to success
  • Talent acquisition opportunities in timely response to growing service demand

Hospital and Community Palliative Performance Profile:

The Palliative Performance Profile sketches the potentially futile ineffective care a hospital and/or community provides to patients during their final months of life or during the hospitalization in which death occurs. The Profile also creates an opportunity to compare performance on these variables among peers, in other words, the Profile offers relative insights into the hospital's and community's palliative care practices.

The Profile examines and then grades a hospital's performance in these palliative outcome measures against local, state, and national performance data, among other uses:

  • build a case statement for the formation of a hospital-based/community-based palliative care program
  • identify performance improvement opportunities for palliative care within your program and community
  • sharpen criteria for hiring the right palliative care specialists with the right competencies to be  immediate contibutors
  • gain a better understanding of the performance of Exemplar Palliative Care Communities (specific to DAI's Community Hospital Palliative Profile).

Click here for an example of our Hospital Palliative Performance Profile

Click here for an example of our Community Palliative Performance Profile


Talent Acquisition:

In building your team of palliative medicine specialists you'll compete this year with hundreds of like-minded programs. So how can you increase your chances of landing an optimally talented individual as an immediate contributor to your practice (and program)?

The DAI Palliative Care Group can help through:

  • Maintaining a large database (and network) of palliative care specialists
  • Compiling a proprietary database of compensation information specific to palliative care
  • Building deep relationships with a highly targeted talent pool.

In a tight labor market, top performers, game changers, and innovators do not become "viable candidates" until specifically "courted". Our knowledge of the palliative care sector and its best practices, enables us to successfully "tap the shoulders" of such prospects to alert them to your practice opportunity.

Responsibility Charting:

The highly collaborative nature of palliative care services (and by extension, advanced palliative care organizations) requires sharp role definition. Role confusion, however, is a common byproduct of the service/program launch process. Role perception “drift” is natural, especially as insufficient resources are strained to meet growing service demand.

So that fledgling programs can better identify and eliminate such drift, we work with program sponsors up-front to clearly delineate roles and expected results. We use benchmark data from public and private sources plus service-specific data to first identify performance metrics for the palliative care service and then translate those into performance profiles. We deploy a management tool known as Responsibility Charting (RC), together with our knowledge of palliative care and its key indicators for success, to recommend an organizational and staffing structure which will increase your program’s likelihood for success (according to your metrics).

The RC technique enables your leadership to systematically identify decisions and activities they must accomplish and to pinpoint functions (positions) that will take on roles relevant to those results. Resulting benefits may include:

  • increased productivity through well-defined accountability
  • increased capacity through elimination of overlaps and redundancies
  • streamlined organizational structure achieved by collapsing unneeded layers to place accountability closest to the decision
  • improved communication and collaboration.

Medical Staff Development Plans (MSDPs):

We know the power of careful, timely hospital medical staff planning in furthering a hospital's commitment to community health. Effective medical staff development offers other benefits to the hospital too, especially that link created between physician recruitment campaign and strategic plan plus growth objectives.

As hospices move beyond their traditional role of serving terminally ill patients electively using the hospice benefit, and toward a leadership role in shaping community-wide end-of-life care, the role of a hospice’s physician staff is redefined.

At their best, MSDPs are an objective quantification of community need on a palliative care basis. The challenge we see is identifying a standard for staffing of programs. In developing a plan, we consider the following:

  • Variability in clinical commitment of current staff
  • Presence and clinical role of providers such as NPs and PAs
  • Presence of academic practices that may include teaching and research
  • Productivity data for analyzing MD capacity to absorb additional volume.

So what can a MSDP offer to the executive leadership of a hospice?

  • Community practice assessment around end-of-life care identifying improvement opportunity and translating community needs into physician staffing requirements with associated financial commitments.
  • Current capacity assessment identifying competencies likely to accelerate growth
  • The creation of practice opportunities that attract talent and fill competency gaps.

Hospice executives armed with this information can competitively differentiate their palliative care practices within the community.